


Late Night Picture Show

by Queue



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-27
Updated: 2010-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:50:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/pseuds/Queue





	Late Night Picture Show

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dira Sudis (dsudis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/gifts), [aerye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerye/gifts).



Don comes home late again Wednesday night, the last echoes of the team argument ringing just a little in his ears, far enough beyond tired that he’s at that scratchy-eyed point where sleep couldn’t be more desirable or farther away. When he turns the key in their door it locks, and he shakes his head as he reverses the process; Charlie remembers so goddamned _much_ that it’s a total mystery to Don why that brain can’t hang on to the simple stuff, like Charlie locking himself in at night when he’s the first one home, but somehow _Don_ always winds up locking himself out and having to fumble for his keys in the dark again. He makes yet another mental note to get on Charlie’s case about this: Baltimore’s not all that safe, even where they live, and locking up what matters most has to become second nature.

In the front hall he empties his pockets onto the small table Dad made them take from the house when they moved, toes off his dress shoes on the tatami mat, and heads to the kitchen to take a Rolling Rock from the refrigerator. The glow and hum of the TV, leaking through the apartment from the living room, turn the scene into something out of a late-night movie, eerie and shadowed. For a minute Don’s vision blurs and he’s seven again, standing night-scared in the door of the den and wondering if his dad will yell at him for being up so late or sigh like usual, heavy and affectionate and resigned, and then let Don fall asleep there, with his head lap-pillowed and the safe mutter of the movie in his ears.

When Charlie had those nightmares, he used to wake Don up, not their dad. Sometimes Don wonders if Charlie would have been better off with the den and the movie and the safety. Mostly he thinks he did his best. Mostly, he thinks, he’s still doing it.

Don shakes his head to clear it--God, he’s tired--and moves towards the couch. He stops short when he sees the top of Charlie’s head over the edge of the seat cushions. Asleep on the floor again. Jesus. How Charlie can be comfortable like that, half on his side with his legs drawn up and one arm crooked under his head for a pillow and the hardwood floor under his butt because he’s slid sideways off the cushion he’d pulled down to sit on… But that’s where he always winds up, even when they’re watching the game or doing the drinks-and-dinner thing with Terry and her husband or Dad and the realtor he finally started dating in June. Tucked into the place where the couch turns the corner, folded up as small as he can get his lanky frame to go, close enough to Don that his body heat warms Don’s skin through khaki or denim even when he’s not actually touching Don’s ankle or hand or thigh.

When Charlie was a kid, he did that same thing whenever their parents had company over and he had to come answer prodigy questions, before Mom figured out how much he hated the smart parade and let him eat in his room those nights: folded up small and peered out over himself, like he’d decided physical insignificance might pacify people freaked out by his brain, give them back whatever power they thought they’d lost. Don wonders if there’s ever been a time when Charlie’s felt, not more or less than anyone else, but on par--separate, different, but equal.

Don thinks for a minute about turning the TV off and letting Charlie stay crashed where he is and just going to bed himself. But sleep’s still not feeling possible--jaw-cracking yawn or not--and Don knows from past experience that a night spent on the floor will make Charlie’s day on his feet at the whiteboards tomorrow a tougher one than he deserves. So Don sinks down into the corner of the couch, grabbing for the remote before it can disappear into the cracks of the cushions like it always does, and nudges Charlie in the ribs with the side of his foot. Charlie’s eyes don’t open--Don can see the lids, see Charlie’s lashes flutter a little at the pressure of Don’s foot, which is still stroking along Charlie’s ribs, but the eyes themselves stay closed. But Charlie somehow…melts? slides? wriggles? backwards up onto the cushions until he’s lying stretched out along one whole side of the couch, with his bony bare feet pushed up against the arm and his head in Don’s lap. Don can’t figure out how the movement works--how Charlie can do that, can go from a lump on the floor to long and warm and touching him without any apparent effort involved--but the _result_ works, no question, and who the fuck cares about the method, really, in the end.

When Charlie was growing up, he didn’t have much in the way of grace, which is, Don thinks, a polite way of saying he fell down a lot. Don didn’t get that any more than he got the math-whiz thing, but the not-getting was significantly different: Don was as far ahead of Charlie on the physical stuff as he was behind him on the school side of life, and at the time Charlie’s C in phys ed bugged them both a lot more than Don’s C in chem lab bugged either of them. Don’s pretty sure that, given the chance, he’d still play stupid games with the little blobs of mercury handed out for that one experiment. He wonders when Charlie--who always knew mercury could poison you through your skin--got so much better at moving.

Don threads his fingers carefully through Charlie’s hair--impossible to untangle entirely, as though it got into the habit of being impenetrable when Charlie was younger and never grew out of it, and long enough these days to pull back into a thick handful of ponytail if Charlie wants to go there--and settles the palm of his hand over the curve of Charlie’s skull. But he can’t stop touching, massaging Charlie’s head with his palm and the tips of his fingers, tiny pressing movements that make Charlie, eyes still closed, purr deep in his throat and bring a hand up to curl around the nearer of Don’s knees. Don still has the remote in his other hand, but he’s realized by now what movie Charlie fell asleep to and he doesn’t see any need to change the channel.

“You hated this movie when you were a kid.”

Charlie stirs a little, and the fingers of his hand tighten over Don’s knee. “Mmm? Wha’ mov’?”

“The one on the TV right now, the one you zonked out in front of. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

Charlie’s silent, shifting out of sleep and into some state where his words work, and Don can practically hear the gears start to turn. He feels the movement of Charlie’s jaw against his thigh, the small burn of stubble through the cloth of his khakis as Charlie opens his mouth to respond, to argue, to justify--business (and pleasure) as usual. But Don wants to say this--it’s important, though God knows why--so he tightens his hand just that much more in Charlie’s hair and Charlie subsides, for the moment.

“You _did_ , Charlie. I remember how it was. Mom always tried to get you to watch it with her--promised you could stay up late and everything, God knows why she thought that would work when you were reading under the covers until two a.m., but still. And you’d make it through the weird depressing part at the beginning that everybody else in the world went to the can during so they didn’t have to watch it, and then they’d get to the good stuff, the chocolate river and whatever else, and you’d make a break for, like, binomials. What was up with that, anyway?”

Don knows Charlie’s awake now--he’s turning his head into Don’s hand, arching his neck to get a better angle, and the purr’s changed to a periodic throaty groan. Charlie’s brain may work faster than his mouth where talking’s concerned, Don thinks, but Charlie’s body’s pretty clear on what it wants. Not that Charlie’s mouth doesn’t eventually get with the program, of course. What with one thing and another, Don’s spent a fair amount of time watching that mouth--watching it do a lot of things, most of which hit him low and deep enough that sometimes at the office he’s got to look away, look at David or the desktop or the headshot of the latest vic or whatever else he thinks might distract him long enough to get his cock and his thoughts under something like the control an agent’s supposed to have. Which is one of the things he likes about their apartment, and about this couch--that he doesn’t have to fuck with control, that he can watch Charlie’s mouth and dream about the next thing Charlie might do with it and…hey, and look at that, what a surprise: the next thing Charlie’s doing is _talking_. Don tightens his hand in Charlie’s hair, earning himself a warning squeeze from the fingers curled around his knee--a squeeze that doesn’t back him down at all, probably because it wasn’t meant to--and tunes himself in to what Charlie’s saying.

“…not that I didn’t _like_ it, per se--although you have to admit, Don, those weird purple singing guys were pretty traumatizing--but in the end what bugged me was the science.”

Don waits for more on that one, figuring he missed the meat of it, but Charlie’s fallen silent again. Don’s past ready for bed by now--and for sleep at some point thereafter--but he’s been paid to be curious for too long to be able to turn it off that fast, and anyone who writes Willy Wonka off because of the science needs their head examined anyway. “The science? Okay, Charlie, that’s just weird, even coming from you that’s not right. There’s no _science_ in the Chocolate Factory. It’s a kids’ movie, it’s supposed to be fun, it’s--”

“Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly my point. It’s a kids’ movie--it’s catching kids when they’re young, when they’re learning, when they’re picking stuff up right and left, and it’s telling them, you know, all this crap about chocolate rivers and candy boats and whatever else, and none of it makes any sense whatsoever, Don. It’s all bad science, all of it. I mean, c’mon, the boat would totally have melted in chocolate hot enough to, like, _flow_ that fast--and yeah, okay, second-degree burns aren’t, whatever, fairy-taleish, but why give it to them _wrong_? And the way the kid--”

“Charlie,” Don interjects, mostly for something to say. Talk about a river-- _his_ Charlie’s in full spate now, in teacher mode but with that husky nighttime voice on, and Don doesn’t know whether to laugh at him or just kiss him silent.

“--Charlie, right, the way Charlie and his grandfather float? On, like, burped gas? Totally wrong, impossible, it would never work, they’d fall instantly. And the, what, the gum turning that other kid blue and blowing her up, and the purple guys were gonna have to, like, juice her or something? I mean, aside from the _severe_ damage that would do to her internal organs, how gross is that? Like Stephen King on acid, right, _great_ for kids. And--”

By now the laughter’s winning--Don’s sides hurt from holding it in--but the need to kiss Charlie is winning, too, because listening to Charlie like this turns Don’s crank _hard_ , and suddenly he’s bending down and licking his way into Charlie’s mouth. The angle’s weird, but it doesn’t matter; Charlie tastes like he always does, of sweet black coffee and a little chalk and their long shared history, and Don’s halfway to drunk on him by the time he lifts his head. “Right, Charlie. Got it. It wasn’t the--what did you call them?--the purple singing guys, it was the science.”

“The _non_ -science, Don. If they’d made any effort at all to get it right--which they didn’t--it wouldn’t have bugged me. But it was so clearly off, and I was supposed to like it because I was a little kid, but kids aren’t _dumb_ , you know, they _see_ that stuff--”

Don leans over and kisses Charlie again, angling Charlie’s head with the hand still buried in his curls, and when he straightens up this time Charlie’s smiling a little ruefully, running his tongue over lips Don bets are as beard-burned as Don’s own.

“I get the feeling you’ve had enough of this conversation.”

Don grins down at him. “You think? Because I wouldn’t want to shut you down mid-rant or anything, just because it’s after midnight and you’re totally overanalyzing a children’s movie instead of, say, sleeping.”

Charlie raises one eyebrow, and his answering grin is teasing. “Yeah, but Don, see, here’s the thing: I bet you never liked Willy Wonka either.”

Don snorts, cuffing Charlie softly on the side of the head with the hand not tangled in his hair. “Bullshit, Charlie, I did so. It’s a classic. No reason not to.”

Charlie turns so he’s facing up, the arch of his neck just a little sweaty where it rests over Don’s thigh, and begins to tick things off on his long fingers. “Chaos. Disorder. Unpredictability. No obvious rules announced up front. No obedience to the rules once announced.”

“No way.”

“Way.” Charlie’s grin widens.

“No w--” The automatic retort dies on Don’s lips as what Charlie’s said sinks into his sleepy, sex-hazy brain. Chaos, uncertainty, the absence of rules--all things Don’s disliked since he can remember, things he’s spent his life working against. Typical Charlie, spotting right out of the gate something Don’s missed for years, pulling a pattern out of what anyone else would have written off as thin air. “Shit, Charlie. You’re right. Fuck.”

He’s distracted now, wondering what else Charlie might be seeing that no one else--including Don--has figured out yet, and it takes him a few seconds to see the glint in Charlie’s eye. But Charlie’s used to these hours--he’s coming up as Don’s going down, and he’s awake now and moving fast--and that few seconds is all he needs. The flurry of movement that jolts Don awake again has the shape of the wrestling moves he taught a younger--and far more defenseless--Charlie, and the end of it heats his blood: he’s flat on his back, pinned and held, hands caught over his head, and both of them are breathless and sweating and hard. Charlie’s grin’s getting wider and wilder, and Don knows a good thing when he sees it, but he’s got to make that last word his, so… He tries for casual, knowing he’s going to miss by a mile.

“Not that I’m not enjoying this, Charlie, but the movie’s still on, y’know. Don’t you want to see how it ends? Satisfy your scientific curiosity? See if Willy Wonka ever gets the science right?”

Charlie’s hips grind down against Don’s, once and then again, and the fingers around Don’s wrists tighten just enough. Don groans, and when Charlie’s mouth moves to his ear he has to concentrate hard to hear the whispered words.

“Don?”

What was the question again? “…Yeah, Charlie?”

“ _Fuck_ Willy Wonka.”


End file.
